Publish your data

Research data generated and collected for a specific project may have potential value beyond its original intent. Where research data is available, this improves the transparency of the research and allows results to be reproduced and validated.An increasing number of funders are requiring data arising from projects to be openly published. Additionally, some publishers now requires data supporting any articles published made publicly available.Exceptions are generally only made in the case of confidential data, only if the data cannot be sufficiently anonymized.

Options for publishing your data include:

In a repository or data archiveDepositing your data in a data archive or repository increases the discoverability of your data as well as satisfying funder and journal publisher data policy requirements. Re3data.org offers you an overview of data repositories. If you want to make your data available for the long term, your data should be made accessible, discoverable and fit for re-use on a stable location which can be cited and for which statistics can be collected. TU Delft offers 4TU.ResearchData for doing just that. Find more information on depositing data at 4TU.ResearchData.

Via a project, departmental, or personal web siteBy itself this is unlikely to comply with funder expectations regarding long term preservation of data. Ideally you should deposit copies of the data in a data repository or data archive as well.

As supplementary materials attached to a journalThe most familiar kind of data publication is a traditional journal article accompanied by underlying data. That data can be hosted by the journal as supplementary material or deposited in a third-party repository. The trend is away from supplemental material because repositories are considered to be better suited to ensure long-term preservation and access to the data.

As a description of your dataset in a data journalData papers are scholarly publications of medium length containing a non-technical description of a dataset and putting the data in a research context. Each paper gets a persistent identifier providing publication credits to the author.

Funds to support you in publishing your data

4TU.Centre for Research Data introduced two funds to support you with publishing your research data: the Data Refinement Fund for helping you to make your valuable data available online and the Data Paper Fund to cover your data paper publishing costs.

Feel free to email library@tudelft.nl we are more than willing to help you with your data publishing questions.

On the RDM portal information on research data management is provided for every stage of your research project.